The Relationship Between the Mentorship Skills and Professional Attitudes of Preceptor Nurses: A Multi-Centre Study

Abstract

Objective: The research was conducted to determine to evaluate the mentoring skills of the preceptor nurses, their professional attitudes and the relationship between mentorship skills and professional attitudes. Methods: The study was conducted with all preceptor nurses who guided newly hired nurses (n: 245) that were employed at two university hospitals, two research, and training hospitals, and two private hospitals under the Turkish Ministry of Health. The data were collected between 1 August and 30 October 2017. The research was conducted with a descriptive and relationship-seeking design. The data were collected by using Nurse Information Form, the Mentorship Scale, and the Vocational Professional Attitude Inventory. Frequencies, percentages, means, standard deviations, ANOVA, t-test, Kruskal Wallis tests were used to analyze the data, while Cronbach’s alpha coefficient and Pearson analyses were used for reliability analysis. Results: This research determined that 80.8% stated that they voluntarily worked as preceptor nurses, 58.8% said they attended training programs on the preceptor, and 84.1% expressed their relationship with the nurse they supervised as a teacher-student relationship. The participants had high mentorship skills (4.27±0.43) and high vocational professional attitudes (147.42±9.56). As the mentorship skills of the participants increased, it was observed that their vocational professional attitudes also significantly increased (p